Mackey

Experiments

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WordPress — serve different content based on location (geolocation)

I’ll keep this short and sweet, as mostly this is just to highlight a plugin that we found useful for serving content based on location for WordPress — geolocation or country filtering or whatever you would like to call it.

Our problem: We needed to serve different prices based on whether a user was in a European country, Great Britain, or default to the United States for all others.  The other caveat was that we needed to do this within an actual page in WordPress via the WYSIWYG Editor.

First we attempted with a plugin WP Geocode Filter. Although this works great with ability to use shortcodes to provide content based on country, it did not have the ability to make “else if” and “else” statements so that if no country matched or if the country could not be detected that it would default to the US Dollar.

So realizing this shortcoming, we had two options. 1. write our own plugin to solve the issue, or 2. possibly use another plugin called Country Filter WordPress Plugin and use in page PHP to execute the “if else” and “else” statements.  We decided to first test out Country Filter WordPress Plugin as it would be relatively quick to test and if it worked save the client time and money from building from scratch. In order to execute the PHP we also installed Allow PHP in Posts & Pages plugin (visit the plugin to see more about how to include PHP in your pages/ posts).

On our quick and dirty test of the plugin, everything worked smoothly.  Essentially our code within WordPress’ WYSIWYG Editor looked something like the below.

if (function_exists('isCountryInFilter')) {
if(isCountryInFilter(array("al","ad","am","at","by","be","ba","bg","ch","cy","cz","de","dk","ee","es","fo","fi","fr","ge","gi","gr","hu","hr","ie","is","it","lt","mc","mk","mt","no","nl","pl","pt","ro","ru","se","si","sk","sm","tr","ua","va"))) {

echo '[h1 style="text-align:center"]€0[/h1]';

} elseif(isCountryInFilter(array("gb"))) {

echo '[h1 style="text-align:center"]£0[/h1]';

 } else { 

echo '[h1 style="text-align:center"]$0[/h1]';

} }

 
I won’t walk you through all the options here.  This post is more to hopefully help those in search of similar functionality and steer them in the right direction, as well as validate that the plugin works and is worth the $18 price tag (and BTW I nor Mackey have any affiliation with the plugin author).

To view more about the Country Filter Plugin, go to https://www.codediesel.com/plugins/country-filter/

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Creating a Timeline with Google Spreadsheet

I was looking at a timeline on KPCC.org (Public Radio’s website here in Southern California) and got to wondering how they could quickly put together a timeline with a simple graphical interface, with images and links.  My first thought was maybe they have a custom built module in there CMS that handles this, or maybe they are hand coding the whole thing on the fly, or maybe… but really this can’t be rocket science.

In most cases I only look for a solution when I have a problem.  I’ve never had a need to build a timeline on the fly, so I’ve never much looked at what was already out regarding developing interactive timelines.  But in this case my curiosity got the best of me and I had to look under the hood.

What I found was that essentially KPCC is using three scripts:

  1. Tabletop
  2. Timeline
  3. Handlebars

Now what’s cool is that all these timelines are being generated from Google Spreadsheets (WTF, so super easy). Basically here’s what being done :

  • They are creating a Google Spreadsheet using unique column titles, and storing each set of data in a row.  Pretty simple concept.
  • Then using Tabletop.js they are taking the URL of the Google Spreadsheet and making it accessible through Javascript.
  • What is generated from Tabletop.js is readable by Handlebars, which basically is the simplest of templating.
  • Then they use Timeline to create a vertical timeline which utilizes Isotope (another cool script) and bam you got yourself a timeline on the fly!

Outside of the timeline I could potentially see the mass benefits of using Handlebars and Tabletop, ie putting together a simple prototype of a database driven site before investing the time and money into the real thing, and so on and so on.

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Keeping Tabs on PCC’s Journey to the HACU Conference

Recently, Pasadena City College sent 6 students to the HACU Conference in Washington DC.  So, we wanted to do something that would empower the students, allow them to reflect on their trip, and show the world how PCC, eSTEM and the HACU conference is helping the future of tomorrow (yea, sounds cliche, but true).

Our first step was to make sure all the students were on board, then we decided to set up the students with their own tumblr accounts each with their own unique email address.  The email address was used for posting to their tumblr account from their phones.  We then took the each tumblr blog and pulled the RSS feed to populate posts with PCC eSTEM’s WordPress site, assigning each to the appropriate category and author.  So basically student >> send email >> posts to tumblr >> posts to WordPress.

All in all, it was a grand experiment to see if this is a process we could emulate in the future, so no grand expectations! It worked like a charm though and the students did a fantastic job.

I’d say it’s worth a look! Check it out at https://pccstem.org/category/hacu/